Discovery hit by outage
Discovery’s online platforms for its medical aid and insurance services are suffering an outage, with customers reporting problems with the website and app since 12:00 on Monday, 6 October 2025.
The Discovery Bank website and app do not appear to be impacted. Attempting to access Discovery’s main website returns a Weblogic Bridge error.
“Failure of Web Server bridge: No backend server available for connection: timed out after 10 seconds or idempotent set to OFF or method not idempotent,” it states.
A subsequent attempt to access the website returned a proxy error, giving an “Error reading from remote server” message.
“The proxy server received an invalid response from an upstream server. The proxy server could not handle the request.”
Several users on Twitter/X said they had been impacted by the outage, preventing them from paying their monthly fee and accessing self-service functionality.
“Discovery, good day. I’m trying to pay my medical aid, but the website seems to be down?” one customer stated.
“Discovery, your site is not working and we are failing to fulfil our self-service needs. Please assist,” said another.
Following questions from customers on social media, Discovery confirmed that it was experiencing problems with its website.
“We are currently experiencing an error via the Discovery website, the relevant team is working on resolving the error, we apologise for the inconvenience caused, once the fix has been resolved you may reassess,” it said.
Discovery is not the only company to have experienced major disruptions to their online services in the past week.
The Courier Guy’s website was offline on Tuesday, 30 September, while Mweb experienced an outage of its email services on Thursday, 2 October.
According to The Courier Guy, the website outage did not disrupt its services. It also provided customers with alternative methods to book collections while communicating with them about the downtime.
Mweb said its outage was limited to email access via POP/IMAP and the webmail portal due to an issue at its upstream vendor.
Internet outages in South Africa
Mweb is not the only communications service provider that has experienced a service outage in the past month. Telkom’s mobile network suffered a national outage on Saturday.
Earlier in September, Afrihost and MetroFibre reported high-impact fibre connectivity outages affecting customers around the country.
At the end of May, Telkom had a significant outage in parts of the Western Cape. This mainly seemed to impact its Internet service provider operations, chiefly affecting fibre broadband customers.
Also in May, Internet service provider Cybersmart suffered an extended outage when several of its core routers failed due to a sudden surge in global routing data.
Cybersmart still had a few old Cisco 6500 routers in its network, which the network equipment vendor had stopped manufacturing in 2015.
On 21 May, Vodacom experienced a network outage due to a power fault in a Midrand data centre. The outage prevented customers from making calls and accessing the Internet for nearly two hours.
Also on 21 May, two incidents briefly interrupted data traffic for many Internet service providers (ISPs) at South Africa’s largest Internet exchange point, NAPAfrica.
The downtime happened because of a software bug in a piece of networking equipment that prevented it from responding correctly to a flood of traffic from a remote network.
NAPAfrica said the particular issue that caused the flood of traffic not to be handled correctly was previously logged with its vendor and has been acknowledged as an official bug.
“The recommendation from the vendor was to use port protection mode to prevent port flapping and to ensure that leaks would not affect the network,” it said.
“In this particular case, protection mode has proven to be ineffective, resulting in the same issues related to the aforementioned bug.”
To mitigate this issue, NAPAfrica said it has begun implementing static access control lists to ensure stability.
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